


The Terrible And Vivid Ephemera Of Now

by Relaxedinperson



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Colliding Existential Crises, Gen, One Shot, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23639677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Relaxedinperson/pseuds/Relaxedinperson
Summary: Amsterdam, years after season five.Rachel Duncan, in her wanderings, descends upon a secondhand bookshop run by an unaware, expat Leda:Can she remain unaware?
Relationships: Rachel Duncan & M.K. | Veera Suominen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	The Terrible And Vivid Ephemera Of Now

**Author's Note:**

> Rachel’s issue of the _Orphan Black_ comic book shows her meeting Veera Suominen when they’re children. The show never mentions this, but this story does.
> 
> A few simple Dutch/French phrases in the dialogue. Nothing crucial or that can’t quickly be gleaned from context.

A slow Tuesday, and leftover ginger cake upstairs; no harm in closing shop fifteen minutes early. But the door opens, the bell dings. The door closes, gently: a slow sound Mauve’s slow to warm to. But the cake will keep.

She stops her absent dusting. (That makes one spotless shelf in her reverie.) Calls out, “ _Hallo!_ ”

No response. 

Footsteps though, slow on one side like a limp. Elderly, perhaps, hard of hearing. Here for the usual, an old childhood favorite. So Mauve pokes her head around the shelf, feather duster waving: “ _Hoi!_ ”

All black, the woman’s overcoat, stockings, padded shoes. She turns to Mauve and pauses, a stutter in her gait. Stops. Snow in her hair and on her shoulders—the duster twitches in Mauve’s hand.

“ _Goedenavond,_ ” the woman says in greeting, black glove roaming her middle. (The slowest rendition of the word Mauve’s ever heard.) “I only sought the wizard of Oz.” She removes the gloves and tucks them in her coat pockets. “Is he with you?”

Young and English, off to see the wizard. Mauve smiles. “Yes, he is.” In two editions on the spotless shelf, _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_. The feather duster beckons the woman.

Her posture begins to impress Mauve, and shame her a little. The woman’s head so level during her approach it could balance all the books in the shop, or so many dancing angels. Is she favoring her left side?

They’re probably the same height when Mauve’s not slouching, but something keeps her low.

The woman stands in front of her, blinking, blinking, familiar hazel but... mismatched pupils: one is a painting, a replica. Mauve’s never seen this woman before.

A hardcover and a paperback sit on the shelf. (The paperback donated last year, the hardcover here long before her grandmother died.) Mauve points to them and the woman nearly laughs.

“What’s funny?”

“You are. Thank you.” She reaches for the hardcover. She’s very near and Mauve breathes her in, some perfume mingling with the smell of snow as it melts into the smell of rain.

She’s flipping to the copyright page. Some more blinking. “A copy from 1984. Me too.”

Mauve hums to show she’s listening (same age), and sets the feather duster on the shelf opposite, to the woman’s back. Mauve leans slightly closer to her than she has to.

Flip a few more pages, Chapter One. One of the woman’s eyes lingers on the whimsical illustration. She raises her head, looks at Mauve. Sighs.

“When I was a little girl, I met a... another girl my age.” (So it’s a habit.) She closes the book, palm pressing its well-kept cover. “She was reading this, and—strange as it seems—she had my face.”

Mauve watches the woman’s lips, for a curl, a twitch: she gives nothing away, and Mauve breaks first, garnering the woman’s brow and playful sneer.

She then holds the book to her middle with both hands, and turns to face Mauve fully. “Her name was Veera. Tell me yours.”

She does.

The woman blinks, then nods. “My name is Rachel. Mauve... how long since you left France?” Fair enough, for a name like hers.

She lets out a short laugh. “A few years. This was my grandmother’s shop—my Dutch grandmother.”

“I see,” Rachel says, looking away, looking the place over. Mauve picks out among Rachel’s features pieces of approval. Ignores the rest.

Rachel asks, “ _Quelle règion de France?_ ” 

And adds, “I’ve slipped through most of them, in my wanderings.”

Mauve has questions. She could ask them. But she’s warm in Rachel’s curiosity, her wanderings. Rachel is exploring her: let it last. Shop closes in fifteen minutes, then there will be cake.

“ _Sud-ouest,_ Nouvelle-Aquitaine. I lived in or near Pau much of my life, ever slip through? I don’t remember you.”

“Regrettably, no. I have seen the Pyrenees—from the Spanish side. And Andorra, the valleys. But I’ve not visited Pau.” She taps the book in her clutches a few times, then no more. “I suppose there’s nothing stopping me, after all.”

“You’re still young.”

An appreciative rasp. “Despite appearances?”

Its snowy camouflage gone to frizz, Mauve notices the exposed, shock-white roots of Rachel’s hair.

“I used to color it,” Rachel says. (Mauve was fixating.) “But it’s been years. Let the birds nest in my hair.”

Then she lolls her head back and to the side and lifts her chin, a gesture encompassing their full surroundings: “I’d like to look around.”

Mauve grabs her feather duster off the shelf to goad Rachel with indifferent thrusts and swipes of air: “Please do. Buy it all. You’re rich.”

“I travel light.” Rachel stalks the rows of shelves, disappears from view but that’s all. The space is small enough that they could talk from opposite corners at a comfortable volume.

So Mauve heads for a corner. To the counter, flicking the duster in thoughtless patterns along the countertop. Dumping the duster in its drawer, no misplacing it today.

Dust from the spotless shelf, on the countertop. Thoughtless. She wipes it on her sleeve, and rests her elbow on the clean surface, props herself up palm to cheek. Lets her eyelids drop by half.

“So you like birds?”

“Hate them,” comes Rachel’s reply. (Funny that it comes from the nature section.) “Will you tell me the name of this song?”

Mauve flounders, until she hears the music for herself again. She’d forgotten she put it on, before Rachel showed up—that’ll fuck with anyone’s head.

She pushes up off the counter and walks to the turntable. Reads from the record sleeve: “‘ _Le goût de toi’_.” And the _chanteuse_ : “Yolanda Lisi. One of _oma’s_ old records.”

“Your Dutch grandmother,” Rachel says dryly. “Did her hair lose its color? It happens to the best of us. Not all of us, of course. Not you.” Her voice is on the move, trailing back along the far wall. “Someone, somewhere, would just love to make note of that. So significant.”

Then Rachel laughs, with abandon (biographical section). “You must think I’m mad.”

Back at the counter, Mauve considers the question; it hadn’t been a question. “Because you met a girl with your face?”

“Perhaps more than one.”

“Sounds significant. Where do you find these girls?”

Rachel emerges briefly from the speculative fiction, crossing over to romance. “Where else but along the yellow brick road, or among the April snow? All it takes is one good eye. _C’est vrai?_ ”

“I’m asking.” Mauve knows Rachel can’t see her, but she shrugs anyway. Lets her eyelids drop again. “Maybe I’m mad—for my envy.”

She loses track of Rachel.

“I’ve spent the past several years...” (In the philosophy section.) “Disappearing, avoiding most things. To keep one step ahead of my—myself. Please, don’t envy me.”

Mauve yawns. She likes this song. “Don’t you wish to connect with other people? I wish I could connect with other people.”

“Oh, sometimes loneliness overwhelms me.” Her voice comes softly, as if farther away when it really isn’t. “But there are complications. Abandonment issues. I lost my parents multiple times.”

“Sounds significant.” Mauve smiles when Rachel laughs again.

“Your inability to connect with people is showing,” Rachel teases.

“Then we’re identical.”

“Strange as it seems.”

Mauve tunes back in to the music, as the song ends in that hummable, old-fashioned way: swell of strings, low end bass thrum. Warm blanket guitar chords.

And a wink from the piano. One of these days Mauve will get back to practicing. Six years later and still: One of these days...

Rachel walks out from the cultures section, looking like no one; like anyone. The air is fuzz, and soft pops. Needle digging through the record’s runout groove, fruitlessly and endlessly.

“I still envy you, you know?”

Rachel exhales. “What the hell for?”

“The faces you see—even if they’re all yours,” Mauve says. “Whole faces.”

Rachel comes up to the counter with slow care, a couple books to her chest. “I’m not sure I understand. In fact, I’m quite sure I don’t.”

(Pop. Pop, pop.)

“In my twenties, a stroke nearly killed me. Over a year of cognitive and physical therapy.”

Rachel shifts the books from the crook of her left arm, to her right. Mauve pats the countertop, and she obliges in setting them down. Two books: the wizard, and a fat hardcover on Scandinavia and Northern Europe. Further wanderings.

“I’m sorry you went through that,” she says, appropriately hushed.

Mauve smiles at her. “It passed. The past is easy.” She straightens herself to full height—same as Rachel’s. “The _prosopagnosie_ stuck around. Know of it?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ve read of it, on nights when I was feeling morbid. Face blindness.”

“I call it face illiteracy. I see you, all the features are there... but they don’t—what’s the word—coalesce. Films are difficult to follow. Crowds unnerve me, make me feel naked.”

The record spins its nothing out. She looks at Rachel, those eyes, that mouth that could be hers, for all the difference it would make. “If I had a lover... I wouldn’t recognize her in the morning.”

“Not always a bad thing.” Rachel’s words of comfort. Surprise escapes Mauve in a blank bark.

She runs a hand through her hair. “In our own bed. If I’d seen you every day of my life. God, I need a friendly face.” Runs it through again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Rachel says, “you wouldn’t like my face, anyway.”

“Not true, Rachel. You’re weird as shit: that’s lovely.” Mauve bunches her sleeve to look at the minute hand of her watch, then back at Rachel, pulling out and opening a black wallet. “May I... ask about your eye?”

“Sure.” She hands Mauve some cash. “I had it coming.”

“I believe you did.” Mauve puts it in the register, grinning.

“I can tell you sometime.”

The register whirs out paper, more fuzz for the popping air. (There’s enough cake upstairs for two.) “Must be a long story. Would you like a receipt?”

“Yes, I would,” as she pulls her gloves on, tugging the cuffs and splaying fingers inside each. “This has been memorable.” She pinches the outstretched paper between index and middle. “May I ask about your grandmother?”

“Stroke. A few years after me.”

This sets Rachel blinking. “Some coincidence.”

“Well... genetics,” Mauve says, and shrugs.

A smile. “Of course. Violent stuff.” She tucks her receipt inside the wizard’s front cover, and takes her books in hand. “I would happily go gray instead. _Vaarwel,_ Mauve.”

Mauve smiles back at her. “ _Vaarwel,_ Rachel.”

They look at each other a moment longer before Rachel turns and makes for the door. Mauve quits the counter to go turn off the record player. The bell dings, the needle relents. No harm in closing shop ten minutes early; nor in having cake for dinner.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from _Dhalgren_ , by Samuel Delany: “It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.” OB used zany quotations for episode titles, so this story needed one too.
> 
> If you’re reading this, thank you. I’d love to hear from you.


End file.
